Director: Ryan Coonan
Script: Ryan Coonan & Richard Barcaricchio
Cast: Tess Haubrich, Michael Biehn, Angie Milliken, Aaron Pedersen
Running time: 80 mins
Year: 2024
Certificate: 15
Unfortunately, I missed the reviewing slot that I was given in order to view this film online. However, I really wanted to see the film so shelled out some of my own ‘hard-earned’ so I could check out the movie anyway, and let our lovely readers know what I thought of it; assuming anyone cares what I think!
A film called Rippy, about an over-sized flesh-eating zombie kangaroo (yes, you read that right!), can either be played out one of two ways. You can play it predominantly for laughs and embrace the craziness of the scenario in a splatschtick, Troma kind of way, or you play it straight-faced and let any humour that manifests itself, ooze out along the way, as a result of the OTT situations that characters find themselves in. Somewhat surprisingly the makers of Rippy chose to go down the second route, which has nethertheless, still produced a very watchable ‘beer and pizza’ sort of film.
The film is set in the Australian outbreak, in the delightfully monikered town of ‘Axehead’, replete with its favoured watering hole, aptly named ‘The Fire and Axe’.
The central character is the town’s sheriff, Maddy, (played well by Tess Haubrich (The Wolverine)), who is quickly sucked into a rapidly evolving life and death situation when local people start getting killed off by some kind of wild animal, with a nasty habit of ripping humans open and partly eating them.
The local, very eccentric hermit, Schmitty (Michael Biehn), swears blindly that he and his dog encountered a giant, ‘evil’ kangaroo, with weird eyes, but of course no one initially believes him, especially his ex-wife, the pub landlady, Donna (Angie Milliken), who, along with Schmitty, helped to raise Maddy, after her parents died.
As the bodies start to pile up at the local morgue, Maddy decides that maybe Schmitty isn’t completely full of nonsense and agrees to let him help track the creature during the following day’s hunt. However, it won’t surprise any fan of these kinds of creature features that the hunting party is quickly decimated by our friendly neighbourhood marsupial monster, leaving just a handful of survivors to battle it out with the big red one during the film’s nutty climax.
As a fan of this particular subgenre of horror cinema there’s very little to really dislike about Rippy. It bombs along at a brisk pace, so the viewer doesn’t really have time to question some of the wilder inconsistences that the zany script throws up; it’s well made, with a decent level of acting and special effects; and it has a nice vein of black humour running throughout its agreeably short running time.
I’ve always been a fan of Biehn, and he doesn’t disappoint here, although, as with all the characters in Rippy, they don’t have a lot of time to add any meaningful depth to their back stories. What we do discover with Schmitty is that he was in ‘Nam, with Maddy’s dad, and while there they encountered ‘real evil’, in the form of a dragon (?!), which he sees again in the giant kangaroo. Not that it makes much sense that the Nam story was kept in the script; maybe only to emphasise that Schmitty is obviously suffering with some form of PTSD, as a result of his earlier experiences, which is all a bit clichéd, it has to be said. It does lead to one of the film’s funniest lines though, when Schmitty declares that: “… this water has the smell of the beast!” Clearly dragons smell like polluted groundwater…
The zombie kangaroo, itself, is wisely kept in the dark for most of the time, although isn’t too dreadful when it’s revealed properly. In fact, some of it looks like it was done through stop-motion animation, which is always very welcome in my eyes. However, some of the more patently CGI effects don’t work so well and, consequently, don’t stand up to greater scrutiny; but I’ve seen a lot worse – any CGI in an Asylum film, for example!
While it doesn’t do anything new with the ‘creature feature’ sub-genre, except maybe making its monster a zombie kangaroo, Rippy is still a lot of goofy fun, if you’re in the right mood for it, and by playing it straight, to my mind at least, helped give the film a bit more credibility; well as much ‘credibility’ as a film about a zombie kangaroo can ever expect to have! Plus, the other bonus is that it’s set in the outback, which is always great to see on the screen. Oh, and check out the, err, let’s call it ‘cross contamination’ coda at the end, which had me chuckling a little.
Unfortunately, this Altitude-released ‘vanilla’ disc is pretty much extras free, unless you count trailers for other equally cheesy low-budget horror films as special features. But, for completeness sake, these include Winnie the Pooh: Blood & Honey and Mickey’s Mouse Trap, which both look, err, rather suspect!
